KoBot::

2008-05-27T11:53:00.001-04:00

EXTRAVAGANT DESIGNS BY LUIGI COLANI | Dark Roasted Blend

2008-03-14T18:21:00.001-04:00

MoMB | Museum of modern betas |Link

2008-01-22T14:10:00.000-05:00

FLOAT YOUR DATA CENTER| A new Silicon Valley startup called International Data Security (IDS) has announced it will set up a fleet of data-serving cargo ships. |Via Searchblog|

2008-01-18T10:56:00.000-05:00

THE END OF OIL IS JUST A GAME| New combat videogame depicts a world at war over rapidly dwindling crude supplies. |CNN Money|

2008-01-16T20:03:00.000-05:00

MEET THE DISINTEGRATOR| 24 barrels of rubber band minigun madness. |Via Engadget|

2008-01-09T16:03:00.000-05:00

THE HUMAN NETWORK | For the vast majority of the 6.6 billion people on Earth, proximity continues to dominate daily life. Communication tools remain insufficiently distributed to alter the accidental realities of war and wealth tied to place of birth. The question of how to make communication available to everyone deserves more attention as the human network marches toward the 7 billion-mark, a threshold it's forecast to reach by the end of 2012. |Via GigaOM|

2007-12-27T14:54:00.000-05:00

IPHONE KICKSTARTS US MOBILE SPLURGE | Part 2 of a Bloomberg series looking at the emerging smartphone market in the US. "It took a computer maker and a pager company to convince Americans a mobile phone is worth paying for, and now shoppers are splurging.

U.S. customers shelled out 40 percent more for handsets last quarter than a year earlier, just as Apple Inc. put its Web-browsing iPhone on sale and Research In Motion Ltd. brought out BlackBerry e-mail phones with video features. Spending rose to a record and jumped the most since at least 2005."

2007-02-24T11:18:00.000-05:00

YEPPIES| Coming of age in the eBay generation: 'Life-shopping' and the new life skills for the age of eBay. A review of the available research and statistics on young people's lives and opinions conducted by Social Issues Research Centre. |SIRC|

2007-02-15T10:15:00.000-05:00

What are Yahoo! Pipes?| In Yahoo! Pipes, what used to be a table in the relational database is now: a web page, an RSS feed, etc. The current list of sources includes: Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! Local, Fetch (RSS feeds), Google Base and Flickr. Each source can be searched or queried using either pre-defined or user-defined parameters. For example, there can be a search of all french restaurants in Chicago via Yahoo! Local. The data source and the searches can be mixed together (think emergence), using a reach set of operators. Among them is the iterator (which lets the user loop through the results), a counter and many other functions that facilitate cleaning, manipulating and recombining the information. |Readwriteweb|

2007-02-09T18:12:00.000-05:00

HOW AJAX BECAME THE FAVORED TECHNOLOGY FOR RIAS| "Why do we like Ajax? It’s clearly not because JavaScript is so easy to work with—JavaScript cross-platform problems are the reason people have avoided it in the past. Ajax is popular because we know that the necessary software for the client side is already installed. Someone had to figure out how to deal with the cross-platform issues for JavaScript first, but if JRE installation was trivial, everyone might have just created Java applets. But they didn’t, applets are not ubiquitous, and everyone got excited about Ajax instead. So Ajax became the favored technology for RIAs." |AjaxWorld|

2007-01-05T14:46:00.000-05:00

D-SCHOOLS | What characterizes the best D-schools and design programs? First, they are multidisciplinary. They combine engineering, business, design, and social sciences. They team-teach using groups of professors and outside professionals. And they teach students who are organized in groups to operate as teams. Second, they can be found in both D-schools and B-schools, plus the growing number of joint ventures between the two. B-schools are adding design course tracks. Engineering schools are opening innovation centers. Classical design schools are adding business components. | Del.icio.us |

2007-01-01T11:10:00.000-05:00

REVIEW OF EVERYWARE: THE DAWNING AGE OF UBIQUITOUS COMPUTING| Adam Greenfield's thesis is that technology and our experience of it will change significantly in the very near future: computer processing will insinuate its way in into our daily lives deeply and invisibly, in a way that PCs haven’t. It will move from our desktops and server rooms into our walls, our furniture, our clothing, and perhaps even into our bodies; everyware will literally be everywhere. |Infodesign|

2006-12-17T14:03:00.000-05:00

ITP WINTER SHOW A two day exhibition of interactive sight, sound and physical objects from the student artists of ITP. This event is free and open to the public. Sunday December 17, 2-6, Monday December 18, 5-9 PM.

Currently exhibiting: "The Ravezooka is a musical weapon that shoots powerful "hardcore" sounds based on your target's distance from the instrument. Squeezing the trigger handle initiates sound and a beam of light. As the user moves the Ravezooka around, the frequency range being played changes based on the distance of the person or object in front of the instrument. The closer the target, the lower the frequency range." Via SmartMobs

2006-12-11T19:04:00.000-05:00

REVOLUTIONARY WEALTH| Alvin and Heidi Toffler argue that more and more economic activity takes place through processes that do not involve the exchange of currency. The rapid rise of this nonmonetary wealth system has major implications for both the global economy and for humanity in general - implications that have been unmeasured and underestimated. That will come as no surprise to Microsoft, which now battles for market share with Linux, the free operating system software maintained by a global army of volunteer programmers, or to the entertainment industry, which successfully blocked the music file-sharing Web site Napster only to see a dozen clones rise in its place, now joined by sites offering illegal downloads of feature films. According to the Tofflers, countless other industries and institutions face waves of "prosumers," who produce and consume products and services outside the monetary economy. This is a historic change in the way wealth is created, the Tofflers write, spearheaded (for now, at least) by the United States. |strategy+business|

2006-10-28T14:35:00.000-04:00

THE NEXT BIG THING| Forces are coalescing that will produce a shift comparable at least to the spread of broadband. This change will have enormous financial, cultural and political repercussions, and the most interesting aspect of the coming transformation is that it will not be some new and unexpected thing. Rather, the Web for many will become the cliched 3D virtual reality that has been so overused as a literary and cinematic device that most of us have forgotten how compelling that vision was when it first appeared. |Del.icio.us|

2006-10-18T18:54:00.000-04:00

THE BATTLE FOR BRAINPOWER| In a speech at Harvard University in 1943 Winston Churchill observed that "the empires of the future will be empires of the mind." He might have added that the battles of the future will be battles for talent. To be sure, the old battles for natural resources are still with us. But they are being supplemented by new ones for talent-not just among companies (which are competing for "human resources") but also among countries (which fret about the "balance of brains" as well as the "balance of power").

The war for talent is at its fiercest in high-tech industries. The arrival of an aggressive new superpower-Google-has made it bloodier still. The company has assembled a formidable hiring machine to help it find the people it needs. It has also experimented with clever new recruiting tools, such as billboards featuring complicated mathematical problems. Other tech giants have responded by supercharging their own talent machines (Yahoo! has hired a constellation of academic stars) and suing people who suddenly leave.|Economist|

2006-10-15T13:20:00.000-04:00

THE CLASS OF THE NEW| Netizens, elancers, cognitarians, swarm-capitalists, hackers, produsumers, knowledge workers, pro-ams... these are just a few of the monikers that have been applied to the new social class emerging from the networked workplace.

In this short book, Richard Barbrook presents a collection of quotations from authors who in different ways attempt to identify an innovative element within society: 'the class of the new'. Announcing a new economic and social paradigm, this class constitutes a 'social prophecy' of the shape of work to come. From Adam Smith's 'Philosophers' of the late 18th century, down to the 'Creative Class' celebrated by sociologist Richard Florida today, the class of the new represents the future of production within and beyond capitalism. |del.icio.us|

2006-10-12T19:33:00.000-04:00

PHONE BLOGGING WITH PHEEDER| Phone blogging is just one call away, says Pheeder's CEO John Geraci.|Forbes|

2006-10-07T13:28:00.000-04:00

DESIGNING FOR INTERACTION SEMINAR| Based on Dan Saffer's book Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices, this workshop on interaction design will feature activities and seminars that take participants from the discipline's prehistoric roots to its future. Saffer will cover the four approaches to interaction design; design research techniques; traditional documentation and new ways of documenting applications; designing for multitasking, adaptation, and hackability; service design; and the future of interaction design. The Maritime Hotel in NYC - October 25, 2006. |Adaptive Path|

2006-10-07T13:24:00.000-04:00

VIRTUAL ONLINE WORLDS: LIVING A SECOND LIFE| A Californian firm has built a virtual online world like no other. Its population is growing and its economy is thriving. Now politicians and advertisers are visiting.|Economist|

2006-09-19T19:36:00.000-04:00

DECONSTRUCTING NETWORKS EXHIBITION BY JONAH BRUCKER-COHEN| Deconstructing Networks by Jonah Brucker-Cohen is an exhibition of projects that critically examines and questions the proliferation of networked media in both physical and online instantiations. Projects in the exhibition include: "Alerting Infrastructure!," a website hit counter that destroys a building; PoliceState, a fleet of radio-controlled police cars whose movements are dictated by "suspicious" keywords scanned on a local network; Wifi-Hog, a tactical tool to liberate public wireless nodes; SpeakerPhone, a sequence of individually addressable speakers that expose the hidden pathways of data networks; Crank The Web, a browser that allows the user to physically "crank" their bandwidth to download a website; and IPO Madness, a slot machine that generates domain names in the quest for an eventual IPO. The exhibition will also feature a one-night performance of SimpleTEXT, an audio-visual project that is controlled by audience members texting messages from their cellphones and a workshop entitled MIDI Scrapyard Challenge which will be held by the artist and collaborator Katherine Moriwaki, where participants can create digital instruments from discarded or cast off materials. |Coin-Operated|

2006-09-08T16:44:00.000-04:00

THE SIX SPECIES OF INFORMATION ARCHITECT| Given that IA as a profession is really only about 10yrs old, it makes sense that most IAs have a 'past life' of one kind or another. |del.icio.us|

2006-09-06T17:57:00.000-04:00

DAN SAFFER'S SO YOU WANT TO BE AN INTERACTION DESIGNER 2006| Adaptive Path's Dan Saffer: "Interaction designers get paid to play with ideas-abstract ideas that can become real-and few jobs can boast that. You can brainstorm things that don't exist and then build them. You can shape behavior, making the world more pleasant and meaningful. You get to sketch ideas in colored markers on whiteboards and post-it notes. You help people solve problems. And if you are good enough, you'll work with companies whose technology and/or influence is so great, you can make a significant difference in the world." Inspired by Robert Reimann's 2001 essay. |IxD Discussion List|

2006-08-17T19:21:00.000-04:00

VJ PETER GREENAWAY LIVE| On June 17 2005 Peter Greenaway, director of film classics like The Pillow Book, The Cook The Thief His Wife And Her Lover, Prospero's books and The Tulse Luper Suitcases, demonstrated in Club 11 Amsterdam his first VJ performance during the NoTV CNCDNC visual art club evening. On music by DJ Serge Dodwell (aka Radar), 'VJ' Greenaway used for his set a special VJ system consisting of a large plasma screen with touchscreen, developed for CNCDNC by BeamSystems. Utilizing this system, Greenaway projected the 92 Tulse Luper stories on the 12 screens of Club 11 in a multi-screen way and mixed the images 'live'. |NOTV|

2006-08-11T17:00:00.000-04:00

SURFING FOR GOOD CAUSE| GoodSearch.com is a new search engine that raises money for non-profits. Powered by Yahoo! this search engine enables users to fund a charity of their choice each time they click on a sponsored ad. GoodSearch donates half of its advertising revenue to charities. |Fortune|